Sure. You got out, you escaped, maybe to that beach on the Pacific, or to the hills of Vermont. Heck, maybe you even went to South Dakota for all we know. But some of us weren't so lucky. We stayed in New Haven for the summer, forced to endure the never-ending Chapel Street Festival and WPLR broadcasting from outside our buildings. So we decided to make the best of it and see if we could make computing a little better around here.
The most visible changes for most people will be those in the public clusters. We painted Connecticut Hall a vivid shade of puke green. Just kidding - it's enough to have the Cross Campus Library like that, we don't need Connecticut Hall to look that way, too.
Thus began the Great Mac Hardware Switch, bringing LC III's from high atop Mt. Phelps to the lowly Other Clusters. One was thus brought to each residential college cluster, six thus brought to Dunham Circus, three thus brought to CCL, and the other three were eaten by Martians. Or they went to CT Hall - I can never remember which. And Mt. Phelps became lonely. So Phelps was bestowed twenty-five Performa 6115s with CD-ROM drives. Having two dozen new PowerMacs made Mt. Phelps happy. In addition, the rest of the Macintosh hardware owned by Academic Computing Services was standardized, but you really can't make a good story about that.
The PC Hardware Switch wasn't nearly as interesting. Two Pentiums to the Circus, six to 175 Whitney.
At this point, you're probably asking yourself "which is better, Omnibus or the Yale Daily News?"So to answer that question, let's discuss the arrival of Word 6 for the Mac. It ain't happening. Word 6 for the Mac has this minor problem of not running on most of our Macs, so we decided to switch to WordPerfect 3.1. Word 5 will be available for the rest of the year, then it joins President Carter. Unrelatedly, kerberized telnet will now be available from the Macs, which is good news for those of you who know what it means.
But lots of good news for those of you who bow down to the temple of Microsoft! We will not be putting Windows 95 on the public machines! Word for Windows 6.0 continues to be supported! WordPerfect for Windows 6.0 remains unsupported and thus will not be upgraded to 6.1! WordPerfect 5.1 and Quatro Pro 4.0 are unsupported and will disappear at the end of May 1996! Conversion Plus will allow you to read high density Mac disks! That stupid mail button that always screwed up your Pantheon inbox will be gone! And groups and icons will more closely match the Mac setup!
For network users, there is now a hypertext sign-up form, allowing you to sign up over the network for, uh, a network connection. For remote network users, PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) will now be replacing SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol). It's better simply because it has more 'P's.
Minerva. There's no escaping her. Or for that matter, the other members of the Pantheon. What's a Pantheon, you ask? (You sure are inquisitive...) The Pantheon is the collective name for Minerva, Mercury, Morpheus, and the two new machines. The first machine, Capitoline, is a SparcServer 1000E, that in the incredible logic of our setup will serve the other SparcServers. It is not a public login machine. It merely holds the files for the other machines. As a result, Minerva will now act more like Mercury and Morpheus since it is no longer the central machine. The second machine, Aeternitas, is actually (appropriately) the original Minerva, a Sparc 2. It will handle auxiliary services and, like Capitoline, you may not login to it.
For more information about the new setup, and for a complete list of upgraded software, turn to News Radio 88. Even better, check out MinervaHelp '95, accessible by typing 'help' at a Pantheon prompt, or by checking out http://minerva.cis.yale.edu/~consult.
Oh, and one final thing. The PowerMacs in the Circus are finally set up in a nice, balanced order. For those of you who were annoyed by the two PowerMacs by the door last year, you'll know what I mean. Benn Oshrin(PC '97) is a Computing Assistant. He can be reached by sending e-mail to <Benjamin.Oshrin@yale.edu>.